Letter from New York

A Taste of Fame

For a brainy model with a hot new cookbook, marriage to a literary superstar creates opportunities—and problems. *Top Chef’*s Padma Lakshmi now has an empire in the making, but Salman Rushdie won’t be part of it.

She walked the red carpet that night with Helen Mirren and Queen Latifah and the ladies of Wisteria Lane. It was the 59th Primetime Emmys, and although she wasn’t there for the reason she’d always envisioned—her acting—it was, she said, “a big fucking deal.”

She could laugh over the fact that she was on a nominated reality show—she hated reality shows, except for Bravo’s Top Chef, which she hosted, murmuring alluring “Mmmm”s as she tasted food and delivering the signature ax line, “Please pack your knives and go,” all while looking like an earthly incarnation of Lakshmi, Hindu goddess of prosperity, her namesake.

Padma knew the acting thing would happen—she’d come a long way since appearing with Mariah Carey in Glitter (2001). She’d been in a Bollywood film and a British mini-series, and she had her own media company now, Delicious Entertainment. At 37, she was still one of the most beautiful women on the red carpet that evening, luscious in a white satin Dolce & Gabbana gown with a hint of nipple. She was proud to be the only Indian woman making the paparazzi scream her name—“Padma!” So what if it was because of food. She liked food.

“I never thought that this would be the way,” she told a reporter. “I never thought it would be food. But if you think about it, I’m the kind of girl who thinks about what she’s gonna cook for dinner when she’s finishing her lunch.”

“Padma Lakshmi,” she hoped, might one day be on as many food labels as “Paul Newman”—“a big hero.” Soon there would be Padma jewelry and fashion, “like Jennifer Lopez,” she said, and television and cookware, “like Martha Stewart.” In September, she sealed a major deal with IMG, the sports-and-entertainment marketing giant. “She has a global image and no end of ideas,” said John Steele, a senior V.P., “so we have multiple agreements.” “Like,” Padma said, “Tiger Woods.” How amazing was it that she, the daughter of a single mother who fled India to escape the stigma of divorce, was poised to become the first Indian woman with an American brand—perhaps the first to self-brand. “I’m as American as anyone else,” she has said.

“Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized.… Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town.” So wrote her husband, Salman Rushdie, in Fury (2001), the novel he composed after leaving his third wife and moving to New York to be with Padma. If there was a sadness in her eyes in those pictures from the red carpet that night, it was because “I wish I could have shared this Emmy nomination with him.” Now they were divorcing, and, she said, “I’m really fucking sad.”

‘M mmmm, mmmmm, yummy.” On a summer night at Socialista, a noisy, glammy Cuban restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village, Padma Lakshmi was eating ribs, gnawing them to the bone, sucking the grease off her fingers. “Mmmm,” she said, “aren’t these good?”

She was wearing a diaphanous summer dress, smelling sweet and spicy, of her own bespoke perfume. Her shiny black hair was up in a loose bun which she would shake down and pin back again, kittenish and familiar.

She was drinking champagne, laughing loudly and merrily. She was talking about her breasts. “I got boobs at 17,” she said, remembering herself in high school in La Puente, California—“a pimple on the map between Hollywood and Disneyland where the girls were so mean. They’d say, ‘You look light-skinned, but you don’t be speaking Spanish!’ ” She does now, as well as Italian, Hindi, and Tamil.

“I went to India one summer and I came back with boobs. I don’t know what happened. I went to the boob ration line.” Padma laughed. “Where is it written that a smart woman can’t also be stacked?” she once asked in a column for Harper’s Bazaar entitled “Do You Dress for Men?” “My agenda,” she wrote, “arouse from a distance the object of my longing.”

Padma also writes. Her first book, Easy Exotic—a phrase to make a politically correct Yale professor split his jeans—won the 1999 Versailles World Cookbook Fair award for best cookbook by a first-time writer. Included in it were pictures of Padma which might be described as “foodie porn” (Padma in a lacy, low-cut dress, kneading dough; Padma in a silk slip, frying something up in a pan).

Her latest cookbook, Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet, was named after her preference for a contradiction in flavors, but could also suggest the many contradictions in its author, such as: she’s an educated woman—with a B.A. in theater arts from Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1992—who swears freely: “Finishing the fucking book was like being in labor for two years!”

She is East and West, also East Coast and West Coast, having grown up in India and America, New York and Southern California. In 1972, her mother, Vijaya, a nurse, moved to New York from Madras (now Chennai), after divorcing Padma’s father. (A retired Pfizer executive, he had no relationship with his daughter until recently.) Padma joined her mother two years later on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where they lived until 1983, when Vijaya took a job in Los Angeles. There, she married a plumber.

In 1992, Padma was spending a semester in Spain when she was discovered in a Madrid bar by a fashion agent. Her first runway show, for Ralph Lauren, “was Stephanie Seymour in front of me and Christy Turlington behind me,” she remembers. She wasn’t fully embraced by the fashion world, however, until she was photographed partially nude by Helmut Newton, who saw beauty in her imperfection. Another contradiction: Padma is a beautiful woman who is scarred. An accident on the freeway coming from Malibu when she was 14 shattered her right arm. (The car she and her mother and stepfather were riding in was rear-ended and fell down an embankment.) An operation left a crosshatched scar. She has made it her trademark.

Friends say that she is “driven,” “ambitious,” “fun,” “flirtatious”—in short, a thoroughly modern Padma. “She’s the woman of today,” says Harvey Weinstein, who publishes her books, at Weinstein Books.

‘Padma?” The two ebullient blondes next to our table at Socialista declared they were Top Chef fans. “I thought it was you,” one burbled, “and I text-messaged my husband and he said, ‘I’m coming, I’m on the way,’ and I said, ‘Oh, no you’re not!’ ” Meaning Padma might prove too distractingly fetching.

To move around New York with Padma Lakshmi is to be accosted by foodies, that new breed of American hobbyist who knows the meaning of amuse-bouche—a chef’s one-bite calling card; Padma says hers “would have bacon in it”—was tickled by Ratatouille, and watches Top Chef.

The show is a runaway hit for Bravo; last season it was the No. 1 food show on cable. Created by the company that does Project Runway (Magical Elves, Inc.), Top Chef capitalizes on the same mood of cutthroat competition, managing to turn a simple trip to the supermarket into the chariot scene from Ben-Hur. Female foodies of a Sex and the City age seem especially drawn to the unapologetic sex appeal of its host. “Padma!” they call from sidewalk cafés. Padma smiles, does the celebrity wave.

And it all happened by accident. Sort of. A Padma accident is never quite an accident because it is always about capitalizing on a moment. There was the moment in 1998 when Padma, then still just a model and acting novice, was at a movie premiere and met Harvey Weinstein: “He said, ‘Are you that girl who loves to eat and cook, do you have a scar on your arm?’ and I said, ‘That’s me!’ ” (Weinstein had heard about her from some actor friends who’d just had dinner at her apartment, after which they had been raving about the food at a meeting at Miramax.)

“And I told him, ‘I’ve always had a fantasy to write a cookbook, because everyone wants to know what a model eats,’ and [Weinstein’s ex-wife] Eve was standing there, and she said, ‘Harvey, that’s a slam dunk,’ and he was like, ‘That’s a great idea.’ ”

The result was Easy Exotic, a model’s guide to staying thin on Padma’s Asian-Italian-Indian-influenced cuisine. The summer the book came out was a pivotal time for her, career-wise. It was also the summer she met Salman Rushdie.

It was at the party for the launch of (the now defunct) Talk magazine. Even Salman Rushdie was there. Enjoying a newfound freedom after the Iranian government withdrew its support of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, he was standing, symbolically enough, on Liberty Island, home of the Statue of Liberty (and site of the party), when he encountered a new and shall we say more delicious kind of danger.

At least, that was how he characterized it later, describing his thoughts on seeing the image of Padma Lakshmi for the first time in a profile in an Italian magazine, Panorama: “If I ever meet this girl, my goose is cooked.”

The night of the party, Padma, then 28, was wearing a silky turquoise dress and out to conquer America. “I met Henry Kissinger at that party,” she said. “There were, like, fireworks, and my book was out in the stores, and I had just moved back to the States from Italy,” where she had been hosting Dominica In, a popular Sunday variety show.

“I saw him very briefly,” she said of the controversial Indian novelist, Booker Prize winner for 1981’s Midnight’s Children, “and I thought that it was him, but then he rattled off all this personal information about me—he totally knew everything about me!”

Salman Rushdie and Padma at the New York premiere of The Lord of the Rings, in 2001. By Arnoldo Magnani/Getty Images.

He would write, of the character modeled on Padma in Fury, of “the intoxicating effect of her presence.” He was married at the time, to Elizabeth West, a British book editor. “But they were not doing well,” Padma said. “And then I was on book tour, so I talked to him on the phone all the time”—as often as five times a day. “I was in a lot of hotels and we developed this telephonic relationship—incredibly chaste.

“Eventually we did wind up having sex, yes. We fell in love, you know? I was having like a few, like, non-interesting dates with people in L.A. But I would want to get home early because I would want to talk to him on the phone.”

What attracted her to Rushdie, she said, was “his incredible mind. We talked about everything—baseball, food, music, art. I think we did have a lot in common even in spite of our age difference”—Rushdie was then 52—“because, like me, he’s an Indian who is living in the West. For us,” she said, “he’s like Hemingway or Faulkner, and it felt really amazing to have somebody like him love me.”

After months of getting to know each other on the phone, they finally arranged a first date, agreeing to meet on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s fitting somehow that they officially began there, because their relationship was to become a very New York marriage.

‘T he city boiled with money,” Rushdie wrote in Fury, of pre-9/11, Clintonian Manhattan. “Rents and property values had never been higher, and in the garment industry it was widely held that fashion had never been so fashionable.… The future was a casino, and everyone was gambling, and everyone expected to win.”

In that heady era, even Salman Rushdie was partying. The image of the beleaguered genius, who had just emerged after almost 10 years in hiding, with his gorgeous new model girlfriend, proved irresistible to paparazzi. There were Padma and Salman at nightclubs, premieres, charity events, gallery openings, and concerts.

They went out “a lot,” Padma says—she always posing in something eye-catching as Rushdie proudly squeezed an arm around her. “He couldn’t keep his hands off her,” said someone who knows them. “He was so sweet to her. He adored her.” (Salman Rushdie declined to be interviewed for this story.)

“[A gossip column] ran an item saying we were together and they ran my bra size,” said Padma, laughing. “Except they got it wrong—they said it was 36C. I said, 34C, motherfucker!”

She had written a cookbook, yes, but it was really on the arm of Rushdie, literary lion, survivor of a fatwa, that she attained a certain, highly coveted level of celebrity. And he seemed surprisingly happy to engage in the fame game himself, appearing in a cameo role in Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). They became a high-profile media couple.

“I think we were both drawn to each other,” she said, “because we both were genuinely fascinated with the other person. I remember when I first took him to a fashion show.” It was Luca Luca. “He loved it.”

“And he introduced me to all his friends. One of the first dinner parties that we had,” in New York, “I cooked this big, huge Indian meal. It was Paul Auster and Don DeLillo and Susan Sontag. All his friends were really sweet to me, I never had them be snooty or anything.”

She received a chillier reception from London intellectuals. The writer of a rather rough profile of her in The Sunday Times remarked how “bitchy members of the London literati [asked] … why on earth did Salman Rushdie marry her?”

But in New York, where no one ever wonders why someone marries a model, their wedding, in April of 2004, was considered a very stylish event.

The bride wore a midriff-baring, purple sari. “Dinner was punctuated with humorous speeches,” reported the “Vows” section of the Sunday New York Times, “including one by the bridegroom, who noted that each of his new wife’s three names”—Padma Parvati Lakshmi—“was shared by powerful Hindu deities. ‘Three goddesses in one,’ [Rushdie] concluded. ‘How could I pass this up, even if I am an atheist?’ ”

“A mortal who makes love to a goddess is doomed, but once chosen cannot avoid his fate,” he wrote in Fury.

‘What can I say?” said Padma, sipping champagne that night at Socialista. “Salman is the greatest love of my life. We really tried to work it out. I wish I could tell you exactly why [it ended], but there was no ‘That’s it’ moment. It was just like slowly getting very hard. There was no third party. I wasn’t mean to his kids.” (Rushdie has two sons, Zafar, 28, and Milan, 10, from his first and third marriages.) “There was no, like, infidelity.”

After the couple separated, in July, the Daily News ran an item speculating that Padma was seeing Ted Forstmann, 66, the billionaire private-equity mogul who owns IMG (and reportedly once dated Elizabeth Hurley and Princess Diana). “It’s my understanding they’re just good friends and business associates,” said Christina Papadopoulos, Padma’s publicist. A spokesperson for Forstmann had no comment. But someone familiar with the situation said, “They’re an item. They’re dating.”

In July, Rushdie released a statement through his spokeswoman, Jin Auh, saying, “Salman Rushdie has agreed to divorce his wife, Padma Lakshmi, because of her desire to end their marriage.”

“It was filled with too much information, he didn’t need to do that,” Padma said. “I had thought we would eventually say we wish each other well, we love each other, and we’re separating amicably. I didn’t know he was going to go to Reuters. I was shaking. I had to go to bed.

“And you know, for a long time,” she said, “when all that shit happened to Salman”—meaning the fatwa—“he really didn’t have anybody saying, ‘This is my husband, this is my son, this is my father,’ because it was so serious, what happened to him, so I made a very conscious decision when we first got together that I would hold his hand. I was also naïve. I was very young.”

In the past, she has suggested that they sometimes felt their generation gap (“He hates Kanye West and I love him,” etc.). But she has said she thinks his only “complaint” of her was his feeling she “is too preoccupied with her career.”

With the show, the book, and multiple other projects, “I was, like, becoming less portable,” she said. “We had two homes and Salman would go back and forth between London and New York,” to visit his son Milan, “and it just seemed our schedules got so crazy and he has a very big life, too.

“I think he was genuinely proud of me, but I think while theoretically he wanted me to do well, in practical terms it meant that we would each be having to do different things, and I think that that was hard for him.”

She said that she had missed out on the last day of her photo shoot for Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet in order to catch a lecture Rushdie was giving at Emory University, in Atlanta, where he became the Distinguished Writer in Residence last spring. “I knew he was gonna be really pissed off if I didn’t make it down there,” she said.

“I think she just outgrew him,” says a friend.

‘I sat down,” Padma said, “and I wrote him a long love letter by e-mail and said, ‘I’m writing to you as a woman who has loved you and stood next to you for eight years. And I’m asking you to do the unexpected with me, to take my hand and not fight about anything.’ And he called me the next day and we worked it out and part of us working it out was he wanted me gone,” as in out of his house. And she agreed.

“The only thing I wanted were the gifts he gave me during our marriage and some artwork, like a painting that Francesco [Clemente] did of me, and that was fine,” she said. (Padma’s publicist would not comment on whether they had a pre-nuptial agreement.)

“I really miss him. I miss his counsel, I miss the sound of his voice. Now I’m staying in a fucking hotel with all my shit in storage. Some days I’m like, You know, I think I’m going to be O.K., and then I have a day where I feel, like, exiled from my life because I had to move out.

“It was really hard to pack up and leave. I was just in pieces, I couldn’t function. My cousins came and helped me pack. They said, ‘We’re gonna pack all your jewelry,’ and we put the TV on and there was a story on about my divorce. I always thought it would be like ‘Author Salman Rushdie separates from his wife,’ but it was something like ‘Top Chef host’ ”—here she laughed—“ ‘divorcing,’ ’cause it’s America and all they care about is TV.”

‘I pulled this out of my ass,” Padma kept telling people the night of her dinner party at the SoHo office suite of her friend Rick Schwartz, a producer of The Departed and The Aviator. When I arrived, a chef and a sous-chef were in the kitchen making rice and fish curry. A “prop stylist” was padding about lighting candles. A famous New York D.J., D.J. Rekha, was spinning hip-hop tunes.

Padma was swirling around in a 1970s lace dress, looking breathtaking as usual.

“Taste this,” she said, shoving a piece of bread in my mouth. It was smothered with goat cheese and mango chutney. Delicious.

Can she cook? “She’s very good, she has her own style,” Tom Colicchio, the celebrated chef and Top Chef head judge, later told me on the phone. “‘Chef’ means you’re the boss of a kitchen,” he said. “She’s a cook, and an interesting one.”

The guests started arriving, an eclectic crew: there was Maureen Chiquet, C.E.O. of Chanel, Tommy Boy Music founder Tom Silverman, and Harper Simon, son of Paul.

“I met Padma when I worked for Harvey Weinstein at Miramax,” Rick Schwartz said. “I had a million things going on with Harvey, and this woman Padma Lakshmi kept calling saying she needed us to buy her a computer”—it was part of her book deal for Easy Exotic. “I was like, I’m not dealing, whatever. Then one day someone in the office said, ‘There’s a Padma Lakshmi here to see you.’ ‘What is a Padma Lakshmi?’ I said. I go out, and she stands up, and I’m like, ‘Um, there’s a computer store around the corner,’ and five hours later … ”

Padma, who was listening, laughed.

Now they’re working together on bringing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Interpreter of Maladies to the screen, with Padma attached as a producer and actress.

“She has that thing a producer needs,” said Schwartz, “chutzpah. She’s tough.”

“I’m not tough,” purred Padma. “I’m tenacious.”

Later, she was sitting in Andre Harrell’s lap.

Harrell, the former head of Motown Records, said, “What I remember about Padma,” from when he met her in the late 90s, “was she was really dedicated to making her star shine. We used to talk all the time ’cause she’s so intense. She believes in what many stars believe, that you can create your own destiny.”

Near the end of the evening, Padma was traveling around the room making people taste her “chocolate soup.” It was supposed to be ice cream, but it didn’t quite take. (Don’t tell the contestants on Top Chef.)

“One taste,” she insisted of Harvey Weinstein, as he backed away with his hands up (he recently lost 55 pounds).

“I have to talk to you,” she told him intensely. “I’m an ambassador now for Keep a Child Alive,” an aids charity, “and we’re doing a campaign and an event and you should buy a fucking table.”

Weinstein smiled. “I will buy a fucking table.”

‘Padma, Padma!” “Take the jacket off, please, Padma!”

A couple of weeks later, it was the night of the Marc Jacobs show, the hottest ticket during Fashion Week in New York, and Padma, dressed by Jacobs himself in a lemon-yellow dress and raincoat, was slinking up and down before the throng of photographers shooting arriving guests inside the New York State Armory.

She was seated in the front row that night—a perch the New York Times “Thursday Styles” section would later call “a snapshot of where, at any particular time, as a culture, we find ourselves.” There was Anna Wintour, Carmen Electra, Courtney Love, Heath Ledger, and Vincent Gallo.

And here came Russell Simmons. The Godfather of Hip-Hop scooted me aside and snuggled down next to Padma. “You got a boy?” he demanded of her, wrapping an arm around her. (They’re old friends; Simmons has a girlfriend, Porschla Coleman.)